A few suggestions

[KerrMetric]

I'd like to make a few suggestions to improve the show. Most of them are of technical nature.

If you don't talk, mute your microphone
It's hard enough to follow the show with all the delays, sound hiccups and bad sound quality. So if you feel like you have to type on your keyboard while others talk, click around with your mouse, rummage through your room etc. mute your microphone first. All this extra noise is terribly distracting and can easily be avoided by a little self-discipline.

Be in a quiet environment
Sorry AronRa, that screeching parrot in the background is simply unbearable.

Have an extra person screen the callers before they go on air
This way you can make sure the callers have a working microphone and wear headphones. It would also help to filter out inept prank callers and shorten the delays skype seems to cause at a connect. I don't have much experience with skype, does it feature private talks during a conference call?

Use a dedicated voice server
You can still have your callers use skype, but the people of the league should better use a separate dedicated voice server to connect to. This way if skype crashes at least you guys stay on the air and only the caller gets dropped. Whoever will run the single required instance of skype has to feed the audio output of skype into the ventrilo/teamspeak/whatever client and vice-versa, but I'm sure you tech savvy guys can figure a way out. It might require virtual soundcards to connect the two programs.

Use your forenames
This is more of a pet peeve of mine. Listening to a conversation where all the persons are addressed by clumsy youtube names and acronyms is just alien to me. If you are concerned about your privacy make a name up.

 

[JustBusiness17]

Use your forenames
This is more of a pet peeve of mine. Listening to a conversation where all the persons are addressed by clumsy youtube names and acronyms is just alien to me. If you are concerned about your privacy make a name up.

If you change the name of an business, you lose a substantial amount of brand equity? I don't see the benefit of calling someone Whiteney when "DonExodus" carries so much more value. I'm not saying they should strictly adhere to using their aliases, but online monikers fit with the shows inherent drama.

[Leo] Burnett followed Walter Lippmann's philosophy of creating an image around the product. Until his time, advertising centered on long text descriptions of the product, with detailed arguments as to why it was better than competing products. Burnett concentrated on style, creating icons as a symbol of the product. He stressed that the creator of an ad needed to somehow capture and reflect what he called the "inherent drama" of the product.

One of his most important uses of internal corporate symbols were the red apples placed on every receptionist's desk. Any visitor or employee was free to take one, and this is still the case. It stemmed from the opening day of Leo Burnett's agency, when the receptionist set out a bowl of apples to brighten up the place. When word got around that Leo Burnett was serving apples to his visitors, a newspaper columnist cracked, "It won't be long 'til Leo Burnett is selling apples on the street corner instead of giving them away." Though the columnist was only echoing the general feeling during the Depression, Burnett saw the apples as representing the spirit of caring and concern for employees and clients alike.

In this case, 'Big Cream Puffs' would be a more accurate description of the charmingly "Engrish"esque named pastry company, 'Beard Papa', but it doesn't exactly capture the unique origins of such a successful franchise. The low budget Japanese anime styled logo also fits the mythical story of a bearded man known for his delicious cream puffs. Trading in the silly looking logo for a simple picture of their product would be corporate suicide despite it's seemingly rational approach to marketing. A good product doesn't guarantee success, the story of the Slanket losing out to the Snuggie is proof of that.


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[AndromedasWake]

Thanks KerrMetric for posting here. I will try to address your points...

If you don't talk, mute your microphone
It's hard enough to follow the show with all the delays, sound hiccups and bad sound quality. So if you feel like you have to type on your keyboard while others talk, click around with your mouse, rummage through your room etc. mute your microphone first. All this extra noise is terribly distracting and can easily be avoided by a little self-discipline.

We encourage this of people as much as possible - unfortunately some people just forget
Overall this doesn't seem to be too much of a problem, however some of the guests do have very poor mics (or just don't realise they have to speak directly into them to be heard. I see this as something of a permanent problem given the technology we use. I would love to have a phone number and a mute button a la TAE.

Be in a quiet environment
Sorry AronRa, that screeching parrot in the background is simply unbearable.

This is becoming a more common complaint. I agree that the bird will have to be addressed.

Have an extra person screen the callers before they go on air
This way you can make sure the callers have a working microphone and wear headphones. It would also help to filter out inept prank callers and shorten the delays skype seems to cause at a connect. I don't have much experience with skype, does it feature private talks during a conference call?

This is a good idea and one I'm going to look into. It would be nice to be able to do this without having to have a second Skype account involved though, because that just adds another step to something which many people still seem to be finding confusing; notably that they have to add the Skype account and not call it.

Use a dedicated voice server
You can still have your callers use skype, but the people of the league should better use a separate dedicated voice server to connect to. This way if skype crashes at least you guys stay on the air and only the caller gets dropped. Whoever will run the single required instance of skype has to feed the audio output of skype into the ventrilo/teamspeak/whatever client and vice-versa, but I'm sure you tech savvy guys can figure a way out. It might require virtual soundcards to connect the two programs.

I am already using a virtual soundcard called Soundflower. I felt that yesterday, audio improved greatly towards the end when I was hosting the call, rather than having dpr host it. It seems to make more sense for me to host the call and broadcast it (my connection does not drop out like dpr's) however we need to work out a way to give dpr admin in the call, so that he can still add/remove people as the moderator.

I'll level with you, I don't really understand what your suggesting here. Can you explain how we can connect via Skype to a dedicated server?

Use your forenames
This is more of a pet peeve of mine. Listening to a conversation where all the persons are addressed by clumsy youtube names and acronyms is just alien to me. If you are concerned about your privacy make a name up.

I don't see any benefit to this at all. Firstly, we don't even use forenames in a private convo - we are too well adjusted to addressing each other via aliases. Heck we'd probably even do it in real life for a while before getting used to names. Made up forenames doesn't seem any different to just using made up aliases, and the wider audience recognises youtubers by their aliases first, and their real names second. I, for example, widely publicise my nickname, which is TK. Despite this, most people who message me call me Andromeda or AW and I respond in kind.

DonExodus2 for example calls himself Whit but on Skype I still just call him Donie. Likewise, Thunder, dpr and Aron despite knowing their real names.

 

[KerrMetric]

Thanks KerrMetric for posting here. I will try to address your points...

Use a dedicated voice server
You can still have your callers use skype, but the people of the league should better use a separate dedicated voice server to connect to. This way if skype crashes at least you guys stay on the air and only the caller gets dropped. Whoever will run the single required instance of skype has to feed the audio output of skype into the ventrilo/teamspeak/whatever client and vice-versa, but I'm sure you tech savvy guys can figure a way out. It might require virtual soundcards to connect the two programs.

I am already using a virtual soundcard called Soundflower. I felt that yesterday, audio improved greatly towards the end when I was hosting the call, rather than having dpr host it. It seems to make more sense for me to host the call and broadcast it (my connection does not drop out like dpr's) however we need to work out a way to give dpr admin in the call, so that he can still add/remove people as the moderator.

I'll level with you, I don't really understand what your suggesting here. Can you explain how we can connect via Skype to a dedicated server?

What I meant was that all of the regular members could connect to a teamspeak or ventrilo server (the ones that can be rented at datacenters for a few bucks). Among the benefits would be lower latency times and a more stable hosting environment. One PC would still have to run an instance of skype to take the calls and a way to exchange the audiofeeds between the teamspeak/ventrilo client and the skype client on said PC would have to be found. Just a suggestion. As I said, I don't know that much about how skype operates, but it seems to me all data gets fed through the hosting instance during a conference call, that just asks for problems.

Use your forenames
This is more of a pet peeve of mine. Listening to a conversation where all the persons are addressed by clumsy youtube names and acronyms is just alien to me. If you are concerned about your privacy make a name up.

I don't see any benefit to this at all. Firstly, we don't even use forenames in a private convo - we are too well adjusted to addressing each other via aliases. Heck we'd probably even do it in real life for a while before getting used to names. Made up forenames doesn't seem any different to just using made up aliases, and the wider audience recognises youtubers by their aliases first, and their real names second. I, for example, widely publicise my nickname, which is TK. Despite this, most people who message me call me Andromeda or AW and I respond in kind.

DonExodus2 for example calls himself Whit but on Skype I still just call him Donie. Likewise, Thunder, dpr and Aron despite knowing their real name.

Yeah, ok then. Guess I'm a little too sensitive in that regard.

 

[AndromedasWake]

I see what you're getting at now, however I don't see that it'll fix our problems. The issue seems to be dprjones' computer. Once I started hosting on this beast (i5 Quad Core at 2.66Ghz) the problem seemed to go away.

As for network: my netgraph registered that streaming Skype and BlogTV video was taking less than 1% of my total up speed, so i don't think that's limiting us either.

Finally, if possible we'd like to simplify things rather than complicate them. It's already a bit of a roundabout solution. I'm surprised there is no website out there for amateur radio show hosts that has all these features already. Or maybe there is?

 

[Inferno]

Finally, if possible we'd like to simplify things rather than complicate them. It's already a bit of a roundabout solution. I'm surprised there is no website out there for amateur radio show hosts that has all these features already. Or maybe there is?

There are plenty of sites about for this, though I'm not sure if they work the way you want them to. You might wanna check this one out.

http://radio.about.com/od/createinternetradio/a/aa100604a.htm

 

[JustBusiness17]

I'm surprised there is no website out there for amateur radio show hosts that has all these features already. Or maybe there is?

Considering the UK's deep history of pirate radio and its eventual assimilation into online broadcasting, I'm sure there are more than a few websites rather close to home

 

[KerrMetric]

About the first point I made, "If you don't talk, mute your microphone":

I took a closer look at Skype today and it turns out that unlike most VoIP programs I'm familiar with Skype doesn't have a PTT function (Push To Talk, like a Walkie-talkie). So I activated my three remaining programming neurons and wrote a little attachment that adds a simple PTT functionality (press Ctrl while you talk) to the Windows version of Skype.

Perhaps some of the LOR regulars or future callers might want to give a try, so here's a download link. Don't worry, this is not an attempt to smuggle some malware on your machine, but of course you should run it through a virus scanner anyway.

Can't help you with the Mac OS version of Skype myself, but a quick google search came up with this link.

 

[Inferno]

Kerr: A PTT button is not the solution, since you will hear the sound from the show WHEN YOU ARE TALKING. That's the main problem. (Basically the people watching the show will hear you twice, with a delay of a few milliseconds.)

So I'm sorry to say that while your button might be a good add-on for other types of work associated with Skype, it isn't helpful for the LoR show call-ins.
(Although it might be of use for Andromedas, for the times when he furiously hammers away at his keyboard. Or for Aron when he isn't talking but his bird is. )

 

[AndromedasWake]

Kerr: A PTT button is not the solution, since you will hear the sound from the show WHEN YOU ARE TALKING. That's the main problem. (Basically the people watching the show will hear you twice, with a delay of a few milliseconds.)

So I'm sorry to say that while your button might be a good add-on for other types of work associated with Skype, it isn't helpful for the LoR show call-ins.
(Although it might be of use for Andromedas, for the times when he furiously hammers away at his keyboard. Or for Aron when he isn't talking but his bird is. )

Oh God, during one of the shows my Skype developed a temporary bug where mic-muting didn't actually mute the mic! FFFFUUUUUUU

I'd been typing away for ages thinking my mic was muted (it claimed to be) and then zomgits bumps me on Skype saying "dude mute your mic"

When I listened back to the recording I was like :cry: